Sue Blaustein

Sue Blaustein

BIO:I live in Milwaukee. In 2016, I retired after twenty-five plus years as a food safety inspector at the Milwaukee Health Department. I’ve participated in readings at Woodland Pattern Book Center and Milwaukee Open Mic events such as Lyrical Sanctuary at UWM, and Poet’s Monday at Linneman’s Riverwest Inn. I am an active volunteer with Ex Fabula (strengthening community bonds through storytelling) and the Milwaukee Urban Ecology Center.

Work of mine has appeared online in Stickman Review, Blue Fifth Review, Kudzu Review and in the poetry section of CHEST (a medical journal). For a complete list of publications, please see my website.

Poetry

Business Drink My Wine, Plowman Dig My Earth*

Tommy is a brown and black pit bull,brindled like hiking socks. He looks undifferentiatedon his side, absorbing sun. Box headedand narrow eyed, he’s reconciled as tortoises, drapinghis flamingo tongue loosely, likea tablecloth, between his teeth. He livesin the yard to my north andyawning refreshes him, even thoughhe wakes in North Milwaukee.

There’s a pit to my south too – irritable, tan Missy,who snorts at softener steamfrom the dryer vent. She folds her articulate ears,stretches a tawny line of nipples – she’s vain,but ridden by undercurrents of impotenceand suffering. She should be the boss,but like this city under trifling leaders, Missy is thwarted and sour most of the time.

* Title after Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”First appeared in the 2015 print version of Mud Season Review

On These Acres

I walk down Holton Street Sunday as the sun goes down early,tender with color in the gravity of mid-November.Advance Die Casting’s overhead doorsand recessed exits are silent. From one, an illuminated doorbell watches the western sky with me –

its wheat-colored beam as sentimentalas the rural late autumn of calendars – a cabin, and whitetail buckswith hooves in a light crust of snow. The half-timbered tavern on Richards Street is sentimental too. Once thousandsof autoworkers parked across the street.

Every eight hours, on these acres,hundreds of ignition keys were turned, wrists and wrists revolving clockwisetogether. The tavern windows are crowdedwith pimpled aloe plants and cactus; and one has a faded cutoutof Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s decades old,

from Commando or Terminator, showswe saw at Northtown; the Budget, or Mill Road, which are gone. Everyone lovedhearing Arnold say hasta la vista. We laughed because he was oblivious – unblinkingas cycles or laws – when he was sent by the losers of the future to go back and revise the past.